What's Luxurious

The apartment house on stilts which Swiss-born Architect Le Corbusier had designed for Marseille (TIME, Feb. 2, 1948) was well under way; one of its 300-odd apartments was already furnished and open for inspection. Visitors found the apartment neat and ingenious but cramped, and one Marseille newspaper complained that the finished building would cost as much as 600 nice little private houses.

The brilliant modern's defense of his $3,000,000 project, quoted in this week's New York Times Magazine, was bound to strike some people as a partial admission of its faults. To enjoy the comforts of "functional" architecture, it seemed, the apartment dwellers would have to dispense with many old-fashioned comforts. Said Le Corbusier:

"Why do you want sunshine in the bathroom when you are in it only in the morning and at night? . . . What's wrong with the smell of food if the cooking is good? No privacy? My apartments are for young people who have a different ethic from that of the French or American bourgeoisie. Everybody will be in the salon together or everybody will go to bed."

Anyway, Le Corbusier added, "the little house is finished. And it's a good thing because my mother was the slave of the little house ... I want to make life as luxurious as a first-class cabin on an ocean liner."

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